Nichodemus Mulhouse
Nichodemus Mulhouse (sometimes spelled Nicodemus) served as the Master Archivist to the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions, running the Archives on Horizon until that Realm's destruction. Biography It was 1331 CE when Master Peperian brought young Nicodemus to the Errabunda Covenant. The lad's talent for memory and organization aroused the wizard's interest, and he offered the boy's parents a magicked butter churn in exchange for his services. Nicodemus had never seen so many books, even at the Lord's manor. Shortly after his arrival to the Covenant, he reorganized the tomes and memorized the contents of each one. By the time Errabunda fell to a Templar regiment in 1451, Mulhouse had acquired many of the skills within his books. Although he never Awakened in the truest sense, his talents with the lesser arts enabled him to outlive a series of masters while gathering and cataloging a massive library. When his life's work went up in flames, Nicodemus wept and swore to preserve his next library, whatever the cost might be. Fortunately, his fame had extended throughout the Hermetic Order; the master archivist had no shortage of offers for his talents. Master Baldric LaSalle offered Mulhouse what he could not refuse: a job constructing the greatest magickal library ever seen, compiled from sources across the world. He set to work as the mortar between the Archives' stones dried and he has been at it ever since. The library he assembled is a true wonder, and he protects it and its contents with a father's zeal. Horizon's residents joke that Mulhouse will never die; he has outlived the entire original Council and most of their rivals, sired a family that assists him with the Archives' upkeep and memorized more books than most librarians see in a lifetime. The past century has not been kind to Mulhouse; the technological advances and moral convolutions of the past 80 years irritate him, and his prolonged life has begun to wear down his body even in Horizon's rarefied atmosphere. He fears that the brainscan the Virtual Adepts performed on him several years ago (when they downloaded the Archives' organization and contents into a more accessible format) swept away part of his soul, and he distrusts the Virtual Adepts' "thigamogery". The modem "lack of good teaching" appalls him, too, and he rails against the rampant illiteracy of the young. After the death of his last wife in 1879, Mulhouse became more withdrawn and cantankerous. To many of his descendants, the books are his real family. Although he has managed to avoid the Traditions' political upheavals, the Grand Archivist is not above playing favorites when it comes to library access. Getting on his good side, as difficult as it may be, is often the only way to locate the rarest and most valuable tomes. On bad days (which have become more frequent with each passing year), he might ban a person from entering the Archives at all if he feels he's been treated with disrespect. Regardless of his flaws, Mulhouse is, in many ways, the heart of the Archives. The walls themselves seem to sigh when he's in a bad mood, and the endless stacks seem to glow when he's happy. For those with the patience to listen (a task not unlike searching for a book in the card catalog), the old man is full of tales from the Council's history... and his family's history... and his former masters' histories. .. and so on. References * Category:Order of Hermes Category:Mage: The Ascension character